UPDATE 17/07/2018: Drake’s Scorpion album achieved another first when he confirmed on Instagram that his album was streamed over a billion times worldwide in its opening week. Spotify accounted for 573 million streams with Apple Music notching up 498 million streams.
Streaming figures for the first week of release in the US were 321 million on Spotify and 401 million on Apple Music.
On its first day of release, Drake’s Scorpion shattered both Spotify’s and Apple Music’s one-day global records for album streams.
Spotify Charts shows the album’s individual track totalled 132,450,203 streams, more than 50,000,000 greater than the previous record, set just weeks ago by Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys, which was streamed 78,744,748 times globally on its first day of release.
Spotify put the album on nearly 30 of its largest playlists as part of its first ever global artist takeover, which resulted in Scorpion being streamed 10 million times per hour
Apple Music confirmed that the album shattered its single-day record as well, with more than 170 million streams beating Drake’s 2017 mixtape More Life which held the previous record with 89.9 million streams on its first day.
In 2017 More Life achieved a record breaking total of 385 million streams only recently exceeded by Beerbongs & Bentleys with 411,816,710 streams in its first week.
Late on the 29th June, the RIAA announced that Drake has become its top certified digital singles artist, with 142 million to date — a number that’s sure to grow in the coming days.
If streaming continues at the same rate there is a strong chance that Scorpion will reach 1 billion streams in its first week. That total would put the record out of reach for the foreseeable future or until Drake releases his next project.
